Zomato has now become a household name in India, but had it been left to founder Deepinder Goyal, it could’ve been called something completely different.
Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal has revealed that he’d initially thought of calling the company Forkwise because the domain was cheaper. When Zomato had been founded in 2008, it had been called FoodieBay. But after the company got some initial traction and raised funding, they decided to look for a new name.
“Zomato.com was available for $10,000 (around Rs. 5 lakh at the time),” Deepinder Goyal said in an interview. “We had raised around $1 million after bootstrapping for two and a half years, and we’d have to spend $10,000 on getting Zomato.com. There was another name called ForkWise.com. It was available for $10, it was a fresh domain name,” Goyal said.
At this point, Goyal approached his investors for advice. “I went to Sanjeev (Bikhchandani) and (InfoEdge CFO) Ambarish Raghuvanshi. I told them, “Forkwise accha hai for $10 (Forkwise is good enough for $10). I’m going with Forkwise. I’m not paying $10,000 for Zomato.com,” he says.
“They lost it on me,” Goyal laughs. “So, they’re like, okay, take the money from me. Like, I’m giving you $10,000. But take Zomato, don’t take ForkWise,” he remembers.
Goyal wasn’t keen on spending $10,000 of his funding round to buy the Zomato.com domain, but decided to go ahead with the advice of his investors. “I was like, okay cool. If you’re this sure about this, I’ll use $10,000 of the $1 million funding to buy the Zomato.com domain. They said yes, Zomato has a zing to it,” Goyal says.
It appears that the decision paid off. After the name change, Zomato doubled down on its growth efforts, and became a pan-India restaurant review site. In 2015, it entered the food delivery space and managed to outlast all the other food-delivery apps that had sprung up. In 2021, Zomato became the first Indian startup to go public. As of 2024, its stock has surged 3x since its IPO, and it is now among the 50 most valuable companies in India with a market cap of over $20 billion. And to think that just around a decade ago, Deepinder Goyal waS unsure about spending $10,000 on its domain name.